marionettes
by mermaidss
Summary: they're all just puppets in the end. Jack/OC
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: I might be a little late for the party, but I've been working on this since I watched the movie last year, and seeing as I'm nearly finished, I thought I'd share what I've got so far. (Also, I only own my OCs)**

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"Ladies and gentlemen." The girl casts her gaze over her audience, tourists of every colour on the boat gliding over the East River in Brooklyn. "For my next trick, I'm going to need a volunteer." She looks at a little boy with white-blonde hair standing at the very front. He seemed to have been paying attention for her previous two tricks, and children often are the most fun to entertain. "What about you, little man?"

He's six, maybe seven, and he flashes a bright, hopeful smile at his mother. The woman nods encouragingly, and the boy says, "Yes, please."

The girl kneels down so she and the boy are at eye level with each other. "What's your name, then?"

"Charlie," he answers, trying to sound grown up.

The girl grins widely and sticks her hand out. "How's it going, Charlie? I'm Skylar." He shakes her hand a little too enthusiastically, the gold bangles on her wrist jingle wildly. Retracting her hand and reaching into her worn coat pocket, "So I want you to pick a card, 'kay?"

"Yeah, okay."

She pulls out a deck of cards and makes a big show of shuffling them. The audience 'oohs' and 'aahs' in response. She fans the deck out, faces cast down and Charlie thinks for a moment before picking his card.

"Okay, look at it, show everyone but me." Charlie does so, and then she gestures for him to put the card back into the deck. "Now, folks, my _fabulous _assistant Charlie here is gonna say the magic word, and his card will reveal itself."

She looks at Charlie, and the boy says with a shrug, "Abracadabra?"

"Works for me." She waves a delicate hand decorated with rings over the deck and then pulls a card out, showing it to the audience.

"That's not my card!" Charlie points out loudly. Skylar's eyes go wide, and she takes another look at the card, the Three of Hearts.

"What?"

"That's not my card," Charlie says again, and she sighs loudly.

"I hate it when things go the way you expect." Her face brightens again, despite seeing the boy's disappointed face. "Charlie, here's my deck of cards. Check if your card's in there."

Charlie takes the deck in a small hand and tries to find his card. Pouting after he has gone through all the cards, "It's not there."

"Of course it isn't," she says with a quirk of an eyebrow. "You just gotta look a little better." She smiles brightly, stands up, her warm brown eyes twinkling in excitement. Her favourite part of any magic trick is seeing the expressions of confusing and bafflement on the audience's faces. "Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd tilt your heads upwards ─ say, sixty degrees, I believe my lovely friend, the Queen of Spades would like you to pay attention to her?"

She doesn't turn around, but she knows her tricks worked from the looks on everyone's faces. Wide eyes, hanging down, murmurs of "How did she do that?", "How is it even possible?", and many other things dominating the buzz. She knows that if the audience's faces hadn't been like that, then Charlie's card ─ the Queen of Spades ─ wouldn't be on the mast of the tourist boat, a flag instead of an ordinary paper card, blowing gently in the cool March wind.

"How did you do that?" Charlie breathes.

Skylar grins. "You really wanna know?"

Charlie clasps his hands together, his pretty green eyes sparkling. He bounces on his heels, positively brimming with excitement. "Please, please."

"Magic," Skylar whispers, and Charlie squeals in delight.

She dips into a sweeping bow, and is met with a round of applause from her audience. This prompts her to take her scruffy fedora off her head and use it as a bucket to collect her earnings. Ten dollar bills, twenty dollar bills, she swears she sees a fifty (seriously, is this _all _she has to do for a fifty?) and then she thanks her audience again.

"I'll be on the upper deck now," she tells them, "to see if I can bring a little magic to the other tourists' lives. Feel free to follow."

A few actually _do _follow her up the stairs to the upper deck (Charlie included), but everyone's more than surprised to see someone else entertaining (or trying to entertain) the other tourists.

Immediately, Skylar takes a disliking to this magician. The Brooklyn tourist boats are widely known as _her _territory, where _she _makes her money, and this guy is just about to take that away from her.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the magician is saying to the audience, "I am the next great magician and I will give one hundred dollars to anyone who can tell me how this trick is done."

Skylar scoffs, loudly, and the magician looks at her, his eyebrows raised. The first thing she thinks is, 'Holy hell, he looks arrogant.' The second thing might be that he's very attractive or that the leather jacket he's wearing looks great on him. But ─

He looks arrogant, and he's stealing her customers, so she doesn't give a shit about how good-looking he is.

The magician (whom she figures is her age, give or take a year or two) holds up a metal spoon and keeps talking to his (rightfully _her_) audience, though his eyes are still on her.

"I have an ordinary spoon from Mel's deli right here in Brooklyn." He taps it on the railing as if to prove it's real. "Check it out." The audience begins to stand up as if they're finally taking interest in him. "Please pay very, _very _close attention, 'cause I'm about to bend this spoon with my mind."

He concentrates and carefully brings his hand down, and the handle of the spoon slowly bends to his will. The crowd sounds impressed, and Charlie as well, but when Skylar looks back, she can see a man with scruffy hair and glasses watching the magician with narrowed eyes. The magician holds up the spoon and the audience begins to clap, Charlie definitely the most excited of them all.

But then the scruffy guy pushes past her (quite _rudely_, she'll admit) and grabs the magician's wrist.

"What's this?" the scruffy guy says, making another grab for the magician.

"Woah, what are you doing?"

"Look at this," the man says, pulling an identical, straight spoon from the magician's sleeve. "Looks like we've got a spoon in the sleeve!" He takes the magician's shoulder. "You can give me my hundred bucks."

"You said you would!" Another man yells, and Skylar rolls her eyes.

"You're a better magician than him," Charlie says loudly to Skylar as the magician pulls his own wallet out and gives the scruffy guy his money, and the magician shoots the little boy a glare. Charlie responds by pulling a face.

Then the magician puts his wallet back into his jean pocket, but Skylar doesn't miss how he swipes the man's watch and wallet as well. She has to commend him on this, it seems like she's the only one who noticed.

The magician then leaves, and Skylar follows him after waving goodbye to Charlie. While following him, she bumps shoulders with a guy in a dark hoodie.

"Oh. Sorry, man," she says, dusting off the guy's shoulder. He says nothing, and Skylar apologises again before springing gracefully over the gap between the boat and the paving.

"Stop that guy!" she hears the scruffy guy shout. "Stop that guy in the leather jacket, he's got my wallet!"

The magician simply keeps his head down and carries on walking. She manages to catch up with him quickly once they're far enough from the boat, and she clears her throat, only to have him paying no attention.

"Hey, pal." She then grabs the magician's arm. "This is my territory, so I'd like it if you could take your mediocre tricks and scram."

"I'm sorry, but exactly who said this was your territory?"

"Every magician in Brooklyn knows it."

"I didn't."

She faux grimaces, sucking air through her teeth in a pitying manner. "My bad, every magician of note. Your trick was awful, by the way, but_ well done _on getting the guy's watch and wallet. Your mother must be proud to know that her son's a pickpocket."

The magician raises a thick eyebrow. "A guy's gotta eat."

"Admittedly, the guy on the boat was a dick, but seriously, jacking his stuff? People like you give magicians a bad name. Criminals, thieves, con artists." The magician shrugs, and Skylar sticks her hands in her jacket pockets. Time to wrap things up; she doesn't really want to be lingering around this weirdo for too long. "Just stop stealing my audience, yeah?"

"Yeah." He salutes her. "It was ─" he clears his throat "─ _great _meeting you. Hopefully our paths never cross."

"Hopefully," she quips, and he grins again before lazily turning on his heel and sauntering off.

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**A/N: And there you go! My faceclaim for Skylar is Chloe Bennett, and another OC will be revealed in the next chapter. :D**


	2. Chapter 2

**_A/N: I am so so so sorry for the delay. Thank you all for the lovely feedback I've gotten!_**

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She finds the card in her usually unused jacket pocket just as she's getting ready to leave for work later in the evening after a day or errands.

It falls out of her pocket as she shrugs the jacket off in her little apartment. Bending over and scooping the card into her palm, she tosses her jacket over the sofa and examines it.

It's large, and on one of the sides there's a man, with a peaceful expression on his face, hanging from his foot. She traces her thumb over it, trying to figure out who got close enough to slip that into her pocket.

The man in the dark hoodie from ealier in the afternoon. He knocked shoulders with her and she's almost certain that it was him. She flips the card over, and her breath catches in her throat as she recognises the image on the background.

This can't be happening. There's no _way _that this is really happening.

She takes note of the date, and the location on the card, closing her eyes and visualising the area of the city. She's been in that area once or twice, but she doesn't quite know it like the back of her hand. Two days from now at a very specific time, she'll take a bus into the heart of New York, because someone considers her very good at what she does.

Her head is spinning from excitement as she quickly gets ready and grabs her black and white striped messenger bag, hurrying out of her apartment to Balzaretti's, the fairly upclass bar run by one of New York's scariest women.

"Evening, Rosanna," Skylar greets the owner as she hops over the counter. The woman in question raises her hand in a wave and quickly directs one of the other bartenders to the far side of the bar.

"You're early," Rosanna notes, her New-York Italian accent thick on her tongue. "Thought I was gonna have to send Tony to pick you up again."

"That was one time," Skylar defends herself, shivering slightly at the memory of the burly bald man at her door, "and I was sick. But I've pretty much set my watch earlier so I'm not late for anything."

"That's good," Rosanna says with a firm nod. "We open in twenty. Get the counters clean." And with that, she sweeps away in a delicate swirl of her silk dress and Skylar exhales steadily, thankful that she caught her employer in a fairly good mood.

Through the evening, she serves her customers with a bright smile. A lot of them are regulars, Jordan and his friends who come every Wednesay and Friday, Carrie and her sister who enjoy margeritas after a long day, Freddie, who spends his time picking up girls and Tom, this guy who constantly flirts with her.

As she's wiping the glasses and hanging them upside down on the rack above her head, the bell rings, singalling someone entering the bar. She looks up, more out of habbit than anything else and a grin plasters itself to her face when she sees a tall man with dark skin and short black hair lingering just by the door. He spots her and approaches her at the counter.

"How's my favourite magician?" the man asks, leaning his elbows on the counter.

"She's great." Skylar shrugs, leaving the cloth under the counter. "How's my favourite ex-boyfriend?"

"He's great."

"So what brings you to this lovely bar, Kaleb?"

"You know I always come here."

"Not alone," she teases. "Did you meet someone new?"

"At the gallery, yeah."

"Is he hot?"

"You know I only go for the good-looking ones, Skylar."

"Explains why you went out with me."

"In all technicality, you turned me gay."

"You're a dick."

"I love you."

She rolls her eyes and brings out a tall beer glass. "So can I get you your usual?"

Kaleb takes a seat at the counter, right in front of her, shaking his head. "I'll wait for my date."

Someone further along the counter waves her hand for another drink, and Skylar serves the woman before moving back to Kaleb.

"So, tell me about him. How'd you meet?"

"He came by the gallery yesterday. He was interested in buying one of my paintings and Jess was showing him around. You know which one he picked?"

"The one you painted of that awesome homeless man with the gorgeous smile in Central Park?" A thoughtful smile crosses her lips as she recalls the huge grin that tracked across the man's lips when Kaleb insisted paying him for his services, even when he refused.

"Nah, you know that one's saved for you. He liked the one I finished last week."

"The one you were painting when I was at your place? The weird abstract one?"

"Yup. So I'm there, and Jess introduces us, and he's like 'Your work is incredible.' He's got this really attractive accent. English or something, I think. Anyway, so he pays for the painting and says he'll come back later to fetch it, and Jess says to me, 'He's totally into you.'"

"And then?"

"I don't believe her, because how did she even know he's gay or bisexual or whatever? But then he comes around again, and he asks if I'm doing anything Wednesday night. And here we are."

"Oh wow. So ─ hang on ─ did _you _pick Balzaretti's?"

"Yup."

"Um ─ why? Why would you pick the place where your ex-girlfriend works? You trying to make me jealous?"

Kaleb laughs. "You're my best friend, moron, and your judgement is literally the best. If you think he's a dick, you'll tell me."

Skylar nods, rolling her eyes goodnaturedly. The bell rings again and she and Kaleb both look over the latter's shoulder. Kaleb whistles softly, and Skylar doesn't manage to hide her smile. A dark haired man looks around, revealing pearly white teeth in a smile when he sees Kaleb at the counter.

"Should I go? Should I stay?" Skylar asks quickly, her eyes darting from the guy to Kaleb.

"Stay, meet him quickly, get our drinks, fuck off for the rest of the night."

"Oh, you're nice," she says with a playful smile. The guys takes a seat next to Kaleb, and she watches as they greet each other.

The guy then introduces himself as Jamie, a college graduate beginning a career in New York. He's from London, and he's pretty much the nicest guy Kaleb's ever went out with, in her opinion.

She gets them their drinks and tells Jamie that it was a pleasure to meet him, and he says, "Hopefully, we'll be seeing each other around," and Skylar laughs as a goofy smile tugs at Kaleb's lips.

"Hopefully," she then says, and smiles at him again before leaving them alone for the rest of the evening.

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_**A/N: Kaleb's faceclaim is Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. I kind of wanted Skylar to have someone who was **_**hers. _There's hardly a mention of anyone in any of the other Horsemen's lives, and I didn't want it to be the same for Skylar. He pops up often in the story, so I hope you like him! (Also, he was the OC I was thinking of introducing.) Please review, and I'll try to have chapter 3 up sooner. (:_**


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